Portside

Using policy to shift economic power and make U.S. incomes grow fairer and faster. Boosting income growth for the bottom 90 percent requires a policy agenda that explicitly aims to halt or reverse the rise in inequality. Finding no relationship between rising inequality and faster growth means raising living standards for the bottom 90 percent can likely be better for overall growth.

Hillary Clinton's record in office suggests that she is more liberal than either her husband or Barack Obama, and in a Monday speech outlining her economic vision she set out to confirm that. However, still lacking is much policy detail as to how this difference might look in practice. A future Clinton administration might help change the norms of corporate governance to foster the kind of labor relations that everyday workers have not experienced in decades.

Reader Comments - NLRB and UAW-Volkswagen; Supreme Court and McCutcheon decision; Full employement, jobs, trade, economic policy; Sports, gender and homophobia; NASA study and climate change; Portside discussion - Bernie Sanders for President (Jack Kurzweil); Announcements: Canadian Ecosocialist Ian Angus speaking in Oakland - April 25th

The "deficit problem" is man-made. The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to "pivot" to focusing on our real problems: the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap.

China held its most important political meetings in ten years with the Communist Party Congress in Nov. and the National People's Congress in March 2013. A new leadership group assumed power: Xi Jinping is the new CPC general secretary and national president, Li Kejiang the premier of the state council. New officials assumed all but two positions in the political bureau's standing committee. A major decision is that China will change its economic development strategy.